


Ten Conversations

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Undercover as a Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-21
Updated: 2017-09-21
Packaged: 2018-12-26 17:22:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12063585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: The first major interaction Roxy ever has with Harry is when they're assigned on a long-term undercover mission together, posing as a romantic couple. This is fine.





	Ten Conversations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [futuredescending](https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/gifts).



> This ignores pretty much all sequel canon (except Eggsy/Tilde) because I haven't seen it yet and sticks with the "Harry miraculously survived and went back to Kingsman HQ to recover" thing we've been going with up until now.
> 
> edit: haaaha I've seen it now.

* * *

**1.**

* * *

For a long time there seemed to be nothing around her but the sense of company; no pain, no sound, but still some level of awareness amid the blackness of sleep that she was rarely alone.

Eggsy was the first one she recognised. His voice seeped in gradually over a stretch of time that might have been minutes or weeks, she wasn't sure. "Been taking Athena out on morning jogs with me," is a snippet she caught, as faint and ephemeral as a dream. "JB can't run that far, he gets puffed out."

Another voice said, "Good morning, Lancelot," before she let the subsequent medicalese fade away from her grasp, too tired to understand it. This one happened a lot. _Good morning, Lancelot_ or _good evening, Lancelot_ , every time without fail before he started talking to the nurses and doctors.

 _Merlin,_ she tried to say when she remembered why she knew that voice, but her own was trapped in her throat and he couldn't hear.

It's dark on the day she wakes up properly, the indigo of an autumn evening just after sundown turning the window into something more vivid and beautiful to look at than anything framed in an art gallery. For a long time she watches the clouds move, moonlight glinting and disappearing as they pass. There's a lingering wooziness in her whole body as the nurses and doctors examine her; she's aware of how much pain is lurking below the film of drugs blocking her injuries from her brain, and it's an unpleasant realisation.

But it's good to have her eyes open at last. Good to be able to see Eggsy's delighted spreading grin when he bursts through the door a bit later, still in the dusty suit he must have been wearing on a mission. Good to hear him say, "Hey, Rox," and be able to reply, "Hey, Eggsy," no matter how tiny and cracked her voice is.

* * *

**2.**

* * *

"So the world hasn't ended yet," she comments to Merlin when she's finally deemed well enough to be wheelchaired out of her hospital room and into a meeting.

He straightens up when he's finished writing the small, neat M sigil he uses instead of a signature on her leg cast, and takes his seat across the table from her. His posture is much poorer than she remembers; he seems tired. But there's a smile in his voice when he replies, as though he's as relieved as she is that she's on the mend.

"Not yet," he confirms. "Not for a lack of trying, of course."

"Eggsy's been complaining about the overwork."

"Don't listen to his whining, he thrives on being challenged."

It's true; Eggsy seems so much more alive now than he ever did in training. She wonders how much of it is down to him finding his place in the world at last, how much is about Harry waking up without his eye but miraculously with his entire brain, and how much is the influence of the princess he's so besotted with that one of the nurses told Roxy she'd once seen him running like an Olympic sprinter through the HQ corridors to the shuttle so he'd have an extra few minutes with her before he had to fly halfway around the world to kill a guy. She selfishly misses the sleepovers they used to have in the few months between V-Day and the explosion that knocked her out: nothing even remotely approaching sexual or romantic, but the curious closeness of having trained together and saved the world together and been shoved into this ridiculous job together at a time when everything was up in the air and nobody, not even Merlin, could really explain everything they needed to know. So many times they've ended up cuddling under a blanket on one of their sofas, staring sleepily at whatever crap is on the television and drinking from the same wine bottle because they're too exhausted to bother with glasses. She misses it, this sense of being around the only person who _gets it_.

"He seems happy."

Merlin's crooked smile appears again, as though he's entirely aware of how she's feeling. "Happier now you're back with us."

* * *

**3.**

* * *

Roxy hears him coming long before she sees him; Harry's not as used to his crutch yet as she is to her own and it scrapes noisily against the corridor floorboards every few steps, though his slippered feet are silent.

"Galahad," she says in greeting when he finally appears in the library doorway.

His face twists a bit at that, a flicker of sour disappointment before he fades back to neutral. "Former Galahad," he corrects her, and starts painstakingly making his way across the room. She glances away from him then and back down to the open folder in her lap to give him a modicum of privacy. She doesn't know him at all really, only met him once during training and has barely spoken to him since he woke up after V-Day, but Eggsy's talked about him so much that she almost feels like she does, and she knows for a fact that he can't bear to be seen struggling.

"Rather an unwieldy title, isn't it?" she says when he's sitting in the armchair opposite hers with his loathed crutch dumped on the floor beside him, extending his hand towards the heat of the open fire. "Don't you get to be Galahad forever, like former Presidents?"

"Unfortunately not." He stops and checks himself. "I'm delighted for Eggsy, of course."

"Of course," Roxy agrees politely.

"But it's a strange thing to have to get used to so suddenly, being Harry in this place again, or Mr Hart. They'll dust off a retired codename for me, I expect, now I'm being shoved back out in the field."

"Forgive me if I'm overstepping, but I've heard rumours they'd like you to take over as Arthur."

"God, no, I'd rather lose my other eye as well." He looks thoroughly repulsed at the thought and Roxy has to fight back a smile, wanting to remain professional in front of this man who means so much to Eggsy and everybody else here that he almost feels like a legend come to life - come _back_ to life, now, with his eyepatch and scars and tired, lurching, relearned way of walking. "So much fucking paperwork."

She holds up her folder then so he can read the label on the front: it's his alias printed in capitals, and the code number for the mission they're being sent on together. "Somehow the paperwork on your life is much more meagre than I was expecting."

Harry shrugs, and for the first time he sort of smiles. "I'm a very uncomplicated man."

"I find that extremely difficult to believe after the stories I've heard." There are only three A4 sheets in there, printed on both sides with a half-invented biography she's trying to learn before their six months undercover as a married couple begins. Harry must have the matching one about her too, which is a vaguely unsettling thought. "How much of this is true?" she asks him. "Merlin explained when we were going over Sylvie's backstory how important he feels it is to lie as little as possible so there's less of a chance of falling out of character. Almost everything in mine is really me, except my name and birthdate."

"Well, Frederick is my middle name," Harry starts, nodding to the label on her folder. "I became so used to my nanny double-naming me when I misbehaved as a child, it's always been a perfectly comfortable pseudonym to wear."

"What about school? Did you really go to Eton?"

"No, Harrow, 1975 to '80."

Not much less strange, but a little bit. "My father was at Eton, 1975 to '80."

"Well, shit," Harry says, sounding dismayed and very slightly offended. "Now I feel my age. I don't suppose he ever played in the school cricket matches at Lord's?"

"I believe he did. He wanted to play professionally but my grandfather made him join the army instead."

"Then I probably met him when they trounced us. Isn't it a small world?"

It is, and that's what makes this undercover partnership both plausible and risky. There are fewer raised eyebrows about huge age differences when old aristocratic family names and heaps of money are involved - Roxy's known this her whole life, seen it in some of her old friends' awkward loveless marriages - and their mark Paget is a toadying social climber who's going to open up much more readily to people he believes he can use. On the other hand, there's also the very real chance of some peripheral acquaintance of his blustering into their way with a suspicious "I don't remember you from school" upon being introduced to Frederick and Sylvie Wyndham.

"These undercover things," Roxy says, and Harry raises his eyebrows when she hesitates as if to say _go on_. "They seem so much more difficult than the ones where you kick people in the head."

"Oh, they are. An extremely different discipline. And one I rarely have anything to do with myself." The flickering firelight illuminates the unhappy pursed-mouth look on his usually handsome face. "I'm afraid I don't have much patience with the non-contact side of things, but here we are, crippled and useless--"

"Give it a rest," Merlin interrupts, his disembodied voice coming from a hidden speaker somewhere in the room and not doing much for Harry's sour mood. "You'll make yourself useful wherever you can. If you'd rather not work at all, I can put you back on sick leave."

Harry rolls his eye like a disgruntled teenager and makes a noise of disgust. He's definitely going to have to cut that kind of nonsense out if he wants to stay fake-married to her.

* * *

**4.**

* * *

"Gonna be weird," Eggsy says, moodily stirring the melting marshmallows in his hot chocolate. "Having you and him this close to home and we can't meet up for like six fucking months."

"You can Skype, at least," Tilde says. She tilts her head back to look up at Eggsy on the sofa from her place sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, and his face immediately shifts from gloom to the slightly dopey, delighted smile he can never resist whenever he looks at her, like he's constantly telling himself in absolute disbelief what a lucky bastard he is.

"Saving all my best Skype skills for you, love."

"Absolutely too much information, thank you," Roxy tells him, but Tilde's unabashed grin when their eyes catch is infectious. "Tilde's right. It's a brainless baby mission, we only have to be on duty when we're not in the hotel suite. Merlin said he'd usually conscript support staff to go in on surveillance like this, but since we're both out of action..." She unpauses the game on Eggsy's massive telly and goes back to shooting zombies with brutal, flawless precision, adding in an impression of Merlin that's nowhere near as spectacular as Eggsy's newest favourite way of winding him up, " _Make yourself useful_. I don't mind. I'd rather do this than lie around at home watching Judge Rinder all day. It's just..."

"Fucking frustrating," Eggsy fills in when she trails off, and Roxy shoots the last zombie right in the dick.

"Yes. And awkward. Harry and I barely know each other."

"Harry's amazing," Eggsy says a bit wistfully.

"Well, now you've done it," Tilde says, faking annoyance as she knee-walks to Roxy's sofa with the wine bottle and tops up both their glasses before settling down there instead of by Eggsy. "All we're going to hear for the next five hours is a timeline of that man's achievements from birth. You know, I didn't find out until last week that he was the person who blew up half of Södermalm a few years ago."

"It was _one building_ ," Eggsy protests, in a resigned sort of tone that suggests it's been a regular topic of discussion between them.

Roxy hands Tilde the controller for the next level and sips her wine. It's a long time since she's felt this comfortable, like she's part of some kind of unconventional family - since school, probably, and the friendships cemented there by cramped dormitory life and smuggled cigarettes and commiserating about having to play hockey in tiny gym skirts throughout the bitter winter. She almost wants to drill Eggsy for more information about Harry, try to get at some of the things Kingsman would never think to include in undercover character plans - things like what films make him laugh so hard his eye streams, or what memory comes to the top when he smells freshly cut grass, or is he frightened of spiders - but their time tonight is limited, and this affectionate silence between the three of them means more than anything.

"Ah, you gurgling basket of assholes!" Tilde yells at the zombie who just killed her, and angrily downs her wine.

 _I'm gonna marry her_ , Eggsy mouths silently to Roxy, starry-eyed. _Be my best man?_

* * *

**5.**

* * *

It's a cover story that would probably have sounded suspicious as hell at any other time, but V-Day drastically changed a lot of parameters and Frederick and Sylvie Wyndham aren't the only people displaced from their home and still struggling with injuries.

"Excuse my rudeness, but may I ask?" a woman wearing a bejewelled eyepatch eagerly says to Roxy the night she and Harry move into their suite at the Ritz, just down the hall from Paget's temporary home while his part of Holland Park is being rebuilt after the post-V-Day riots. They both look across the bar room at Harry, who's leaning on his cane and conversing with the man mixing their drinks.

"His eye?"

"I lost mine on V-Day. I've never met anybody else."

"I'm sorry to hear that. My husband was in a coma for a long time, we're very thankful his eye is all he lost."

"And yourself?"

Roxy - or Sylvie - grimaces down at the clunky cast encasing her leg and ruining the lace drape of her prim Temperley dress. "I was hit by a car on the day. The bone was healing crookedly so I've had to have it broken again and re-set."

The woman gasps in ersatz sympathy, already starting to lose interest now she's had her fill of new gossip. "How terrible."

"I hope you're not talking about the cocktails in this place," Harry says just behind her in his jovial, slightly arrogant, laughing-too-hard-at-his-own-jokes Frederick Wyndham voice, then when he sees her face he does a comedy double-take and exclaims, "Good lord, another cyclops! I thought we were extinct, like unicorns."

"Darling," Sylvie says icily, taking her martini from him.

Frederick looks momentarily abashed, but the woman seems charmed - and he's made just enough noise to catch the attention of their mark, sitting with his wife a few tables away and looking amused. So it begins.

* * *

**6.**

* * *

"I can't wait to be able to have a proper bubble bath again," Roxy complains, heaving herself out of the bathroom on her crutches. "Sitting in a bloody lawn chair in the shower with a binbag on my leg is pure misery."

She sits on the edge of the bed to rub her hair dry with a towel, plastic-covered cast still dripping on the carpet. Harry's in a white terry robe and paisley pyjamas across the room, searching for something on the higher shelves in the wardrobe. "A bath, an extravagant cocktail, a good book," he says over his shoulder, easing a soft woollen blanket from the pile. "Absolute heaven. Nothing like it in the world."

"Don't tease me, it'll be weeks yet." She watches him for a moment as she's finger-combing the tangles out of her wet hair. "What are you doing?"

"I assure you I shall be perfectly comfortable on the sofa. Goodnight, Lancelot."

It's all very polite and noble of him, but he's injured as well, not to mention more than twice her age and probably prone to all kinds of lingering aches from three decades of this absurd job. "This bed's so huge it's probably got a different post code for each side," she points out.

Harry cocks his head slightly and looks at her, half-smiling, the blanket folded neatly over his arms. "If you're quite sure you don't mind?"

She wonders whether he ever actually saw the dorm room she and Eggsy and all the others had to live in during training, with the wide open showers and toilets and the massive two-way mirror so you were forced while you were having a shit or changing a tampon both to watch yourself and wonder who else was watching as well. Between that, a dozen years of boarding school, and four years in the army, the sanctity of personal space is a luxury she's never had the energy to care all that much about.

"Honestly, we could fit about eight people in here."

"Well, your personal life is your own business," Harry says with a devilish twinkly teasing look in his eye, but she can tell from the blissful little groan when he lies down and the way he's asleep before she even turns on the hairdryer just how grateful he actually is.

* * *

**7.**

* * *

Roxy always knew there was an almost certain chance she'd end up having to use her body in one way or another on this job, and here it is.

They found an empty room at the one-eyed woman's Kensington house party - Lucille Marjoribanks, as she introduced herself during a long flirting session with Frederick on that first night - in which they could hide to compare findings so far, and Roxy's sitting astride Harry's lap with her cocktail dress rucked up high around her thighs in case anybody else comes in, Harry's hands resting on the arms of the chair ready to start groping at her if necessary. The first time the door opens, the intruders retreat to go somewhere else in a burst of giggling and apologies. The second time, it's Anthony Paget.

"Oh, terribly sorry," he says when he sees them. Looking back over her shoulder, Roxy notices the slow drag of his eyes up the length of her bare legs, the left one newly out of its cast, to where Harry's huge hands are clutching at her backside under the wrinkled lace of her skirt. He doesn't look sorry at all. The woman he's with - not his wife - is licking sloppily at his ear in a way that looks absolutely revolting, and he slips his arm around her waist as if he's about to guide her back into the hallway to find somewhere else to carry on.

"Plenty of room, neighbour," Harry says. His tone is awful: a conspiratorial, sleazy sort of nudge-nude-wink-wink camaraderie lurking in the drunken sound of his voice, or Frederick's voice. He slips one possessive fingertip just under the leg hem of Roxy's knickers and taps in secret, rapid morse code against her skin _Plan B_ , eyeing up Paget's girlfriend with an interested sort of leer.

Plan B involves Roxy going directly for Paget, wheedling information out of him using any means necessary, rather than Plan A, befriending his wife and analysing the gossip. Looks like they're not as close as previous intel suggested, which would explain why she's not been very helpful so far. Fine. Plan B it is, then.

Paget grins and drags his blonde onto a couch across the room, going straight for her tits and kneading them like he's making bread, but his eyes are still on Roxy. She can _feel_ them, an uneasy icy shiver running down her spine. _Focus_ , she tells herself, and kisses Harry on the lips. He responds to it clumsily, playing drunk, playing the impotent, inexpert, useless older husband so well that Sylvie's annoyance is so easy to feel and run with. She wriggles impatiently in his lap for a while, and when she breaks the kiss and speaks she tinges it with sullen impatience and makes sure it's just loud enough for Paget to hear.

"Are you _ever_ going to get hard?"

"Darling." Frederick's voice from Harry's mouth is embarrassed and wheedling, the sort of voice she can imagine promising shiny new diamonds or a pretty little Ferrari to keep his unsatisfied wife happy in lieu of orgasms. "I've had rather a lot to drink tonight."

"Just forget it."

"Would you like me to fetch you a glass of champagne?"

She nods and climbs off his lap just long enough to let him get up and shuffle shamefacedly past the other couple to the door. Paget's hungry eyes are still pinning her, watching her settle back into the armchair even as his mystery woman is leaving drooling kisses across the front of his trousers, apparently trying to unfasten them with her teeth until she gives up and uses her hands instead.

"There are more fish in the sea, you know," Paget says.

It's almost too easy. She'd be suspicious if he hadn't already proved time and time again throughout their short acquaintanceship how stupid he is, even for a weapons smuggler's henchman. "Yes," she agrees, "but I'm married to that one."

He gestures down at the blonde head between his legs, making an ugly noise of pleasure when the woman starts sucking on his cock with her head enthusiastically bobbing under the press of one of his greedy hands. "Why would you be faithful to anyone who can't please you?"

"That's a very good point," Roxy says, sultry-soft and watching him through her eyelashes in a way that feels ridiculous but seems to look exactly as alluring as she means it to, going by the expression on his face. Better give him a bit more, see how eagerly he takes the bait--

He comes noisily in the other woman's mouth when Roxy lifts her skirt and slides her hand into the top of her knickers. Alright, then. This is going to be ridiculously easy.

* * *

**8.**

* * *

"How was yoga, darling?"

There's no need to keep up the pretence in their suite unless they're deliberately trying to be overheard arguing through the walls, so Harry says it with the sort of glib sarcasm he always uses when he's in a good mood. There's something strangely infectious about it, making Roxy smile even though she feels frustrated and vaguely disgusting after yet another bout of really terrible sex.

"I need a hot bath and some wire wool to scrub my privates."

"I'm sorry I asked." The way his face collapses into dimples and creases when he smiles is ridiculously charming. "Go and run one, then. We can talk after."

"Come and sit with me, let's talk now." It hardly seems worth trying to preserve her modesty after so many months sharing a bed, kissing for show, accidentally seeing him naked once when she walked into the bedroom without thinking to knock while he was dressing. She runs the bath with a mountain of bubbles anyway, and by the time Harry comes into the bathroom carrying two large glasses of wine she's safely behind the rose-scented shield, no more on show than if she were fully dressed.

"Plan B should have been Plan A from the start," Roxy says, gratefully accepting the wine and taking a long, cool swallow. "It's perfect. This idiot has absolutely no filter."

Harry takes a seat on the toilet lid. "He gave names? Locations?"

"Both. I was admiring his tan lines," she says, loading the words with as much distaste as she can manage, making Harry grin behind the rim of his wine glass, "and he bragged for ages about going to Monte Carlo with his employer last month. Swanning all around the south of France in a white Lamborghini Centenario. I called it in to Merlin and the team already, they're working on tracing it. It may be a dead end, who knows, but the way these idiots show off I highly doubt that car won't lead us straight to Neville's front door somehow."

"Excellent work," Harry says warmly. His amused smile from before turns softer, proud, or maybe that's just her imagination in the moments before he tips his head back and finishes his wine in two long gulps that make the line of his throat pulse like a heartbeat.

* * *

**9.**

* * *

Roxy wakes in the night to lips on her shoulder, soft little kisses scattered haphazardly across her skin and between the loose strands of her hair. Harry's arm is heavy across her waist and she can feel the solid heat of him curled behind her, the slow rise and fall of his chest touching her back. He's still asleep, or close enough that it barely makes any difference.

"Harry," she says softly. There's a queasy sort of nervousness in her stomach at the thought of mortifying him if she wakes him up, so she tries a slow, wriggling escape towards the edge of the bed. It's no good; his sleepy hand brushes the back of its fingers against her stomach, rasping imperceptibly across the cotton vest she's wearing to sleep in, and the unconscious gentleness of it holds her as still as any deliberate grip.

He settles down after a moment, fading back to stillness with a garbled murmur against the nape of her neck. Roxy lets her trembling breath out slowly and swears, sharp and quiet, when she feels the hard line of his cock against her backside.

"Harry," she says again, louder.

"Mmmhm," he replies, sleepy and wordless. He rocks closer, nudging his cock against the gap where her legs meet. An electric shiver shocks through her, the touch and the lightning bolt realisation combined: _I don't want him to stop_.

"Harry."

This time he wakes, she can tell by the pace of his breathing. "What's," he starts, then he sucks in his breath and mutters, "Shit, fuck," when he realises just how close they are, where his arm is, how his cock tip is lodged between the very top of her thighs.

"Good dream?" she says blandly, because turning it into a joke is the only thing she can think to do to ease his embarrassment. Harry laughs, more desperately self-conscious than she's ever heard him before, and delicately edges himself backwards until he's no longer touching her at all, though she can still feel the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck.

"I suppose so. I'm awfully sorry about that. One expects to grow out of this nonsense but somehow it never seems to happen."

She doesn't mean to turn over and kiss him, but she's tired as well, and something about this soft, sleepy shame in his voice makes her want to reassure him in a way she's got no words for. He's surprised by it, she can tell by the way he goes completely still, but almost immediately he melts into her, opening his mouth to hers and letting her touch his tongue while his fingers plunge into her hair to hold her close. It's nothing like before, stage-kisses intended to look perfunctory and passionless; there's something simmering now, and it's starting to boil over.

"May I?" Harry asks, plucking at her waistband with trembling, excited fingers, and she tells him _yes_. She rocks up against his hand when he slips it down the front of her pyjama trousers, directing his fingertips lower with an insistent tug on his wrist until he finds the silky-wet warmth of her cunt and dips inside with a confidence she barely recognises after weeks of being fumbled at by Frederick. He throws her clothes on the carpet and her legs over his broad shoulders, tracing his tongue over her clit with a languorous precision she thinks he might be loving just as much as she is, and she comes twenty desperate minutes later after he tongues her to the edge more times than she can count and doesn't let her over it until she's pleading.

"Quiet," he murmurs, moving up to find her lips with his fingers so he knows where to aim a kiss in the dark. He lets her gasp in his mouth, swallowing the noises down between frantic kisses so slippery and messy with the slick of her arousal still smeared all around his chin and nose that she has to push him away, laughing breathlessly, to mop him dry with a corner of the sheet. "He'll hear."

Paget's only three walls away, almost certainly sleeping like a corpse the way he always does for at least eight hours after their revolting trysts, but the thought that he _might hear_...

"Did _you_ hear?" she asks. She can feel Harry's thigh pressing hard between her legs and grinds down against it, fidgety and hungry for the thrilling, decadent sensation of soaking right through his pyjama fabric. He notices, of course, and plants his knee more firmly against the mattress to give her a sturdier surface to press against. His breathing is rapid, hot against her neck and cheek with a shivering little whine just starting to appear on every few exhales, and she begins to stroke her thumb across his cock through his pyjamas. "Were you listening?"

He swallows hard, clears his throat, struggles into a steadyish rhythm between her cunt sliding and grinding on his thigh muscle and his cock nudging needily into the grasp and pull of her fingers when she reaches inside his waistband. "Usually I turned the television on to give you privacy."

"Usually." She fists her other hand in Harry's ridiculous fluffy bed hair, laughing shakily, pulling his face back to kiss him again. "Do I sound better when I'm not faking?"

"God, yes," Harry says in a tone that's almost like reverence, and she comes again from the press of his thigh and the sweet, peculiar tremble of his huge hands cupping her face.

* * *

**10.**

* * *

The debrief is as efficiently thorough as always, a million questions and answers and cups of tea before Merlin's satisfied they've got everything covered and lets them go.

"This is why I prefer the 'kick people in the face' missions," Harry says, sounding frustrated under his halfhearted veneer of professionalism. "They're so straightforward. They rarely change course halfway through."

 _He's kinda got a hero complex_ , Eggsy told Roxy once when they were patching each other up in the infirmary after a messy mission in the weeks before Harry awoke. _Suits him, though_.

Well, maybe she's got a hero complex too. "I never want to do another surveillance and intel mission ever again, broken leg or not. There's no conclusion, it's just setting someone else up for the satisfaction of finishing."

"That sounds rude."

Roxy nudges him gently with her elbow as they're going downstairs from the dining room. "Shut up."

Harry dutifully shuts up, but his fingers come to rest on the elbow that nudged him as though he's thinking about taking Roxy's hand but doesn't quite dare to. Achingly formal considering it's been less than forty-eight hours since he was splaying his massive beautiful hands over her bare hips to rock her so hard on his cock that she found a couple of finger bruises the next day, he says, "Now that we're no longer married, would you like to have dinner with me?"

Eggsy's in the shop with Tilde and some comically huge Swedish guards looking at fabric samples for the suit he's ordering for her wedding present, and when he overhears the last part his eyebrows shoot halfway off his head. He looks like he can't decide whether to be annoyed that he's so out of the loop or delighted that there's some new hot gossip to stick his nose into, and settles for a joyous double thumbs up instead of words.

Roxy holds the front door open for Harry because she's a gentleman now, and says, "Yes, I think I would."


End file.
